Ornamental caps for automotive vehicles, commonly referred to as vinyl roofs, have become increasingly popular. The construction of such ornamental caps normally comprises a form fitting fiberglass shell which is received on the top of the vehicle. A layer of foam padding is provided on the exterior surface of the shell and a sheet of plastic material, normally polyvinyl, is secured over the layer of foam.
Conventionally, such ornamental caps are factory mounted on an assembly line which is separate from the main assembly line. The process involves considerable hand labor. First the fiber glass shell is set in place on the vehicle. Then the layer of foam padding is laid over the fiber glass shell and hand trimmed to fit. The sheet of polyvinyl is then laid over the foam and hand trimmed to fit. There is considerable tucking of the foam and vinyl to secure it in place. The overall assembly is held in place by means of moldings which are fixedly secured to the vehicle around the peripheral outer edges of the ornamental cap. Such caps are normally either relatively short structure provided on the rear of the roof or roof covers including the rear portion and a portion extending forwardly covering either all or a portion of the roof. As used in the present application, the term "cap" is intended to refer to either ornamental caps which cover the entire the roof or which cover only a portion of the roof.
It has long been desired to eliminate the custom hand work involved in mounting ornamental caps. The obvious solution is to provide a preformed ornamental cap which need only be dropped onto the vehicle and secured in place. Such an operation can easily be carried out on the main assembly line of an automotive factory or can be easily done by customizers in their shops without special expertise or equipment. The problem which has been encountered when it has been attempted to develop a preformed ornamental cap has been the dimensional irregularities inherent in the sheet metal construction of vehicles. It will be appreciated that the fit and finish of an ornamental cap must be of the highest level otherwise customers will reject the product.
It has been learned in accordance with the present invention that a large portion of a vehicle roof is sufficiently dimensionally stabilized so as to permit preforming of ornamental caps and fixedly fastening a portion of the cap in place by means of relatively permanent conventional fixed fasteners such as bolts, plastic nails or the like. This portion of the roof comprises substantially the entire top wall of the roof and the short side wall portions which extend from the center of the vehicle and the relatively longer side wall portions at the rear of the vehicle. However, the area defined by the downwardly extending rear wall of the vehicle which includes the rear window, cannot be depended upon to always be dimensionally accurate. It will be appreciated in this context that the dimensional accuracy referred to is only small fractions of an inch. The reason for this resides in the constructional nature of the rear roof wall. It involves parallelism of the sides of the vehicle and the relatively large space defined by the width and breadth of the rear wall. It is therefore not possible to reproducibly provide fixed fastening means on the rear wall. Such fastening means inherently involve providing an opening of some sort in the vehicle which may be filled with a nut or the like which will receive a bolt, plastic nail or other fastener element. The mating fastening elements provided on the rear wall and the cap would not always be in alignment and therefore in some cases would not match with the consequent effect of preventing securement of the cap to the vehicle.
In accordance with the present invention, fastening means are provided to fixedly connect the cap top wall and cap side walls to the vehicle top and side walls while clip means are provided on the vehicle back wall and cap back wall. These clip means do not require absolute alignment in order to function and therefore eliminate the problem above referred to.